Saturday, December 21, 2013

STALLERS: How I Wrote the Book I Almost Didn’t Write

by Mick Mykola Dementiuk

In the late 1980s I had pretty much reached the end of my
stamina and nerves in trying to finish my first novel, Holy Communion,
impatient to get away from New York City, where I had lived for almost 40
years. I had closed Holy Communion, which had taken
me three years to work on and would take over two decades to see print, going on win the Lambda Award for Best Bisexual Fiction

of 2009,
whew! (http://www.holycommunionanovel.com/) In that final year of 1989, when
the manuscript was completed, I had decided to take a much needed rest trip to
Europe, where some 40 years earlier I had been born, just a few years after
WWII.

Wandering through Europe was an awesome experience and
different from what I was used to, the shady dangerous streets of New York
City. Instead, here was a European world of newness, really oldness, came upon me,
opening itself up to me. I loved Europe! Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Malmo, etc. I
was ecstatic just being there and each day I walked through its twisted streets
and boulevards, going who the devil knows where. I just walked and walked.
Still I couldn’t help but hear or watch the television news of something
brewing and happening in Eastern Europe, not too far away from where I was at
that moment. I had originally thought of going up to Stockholm or Helsinki and
visiting the lands of Strindberg and Knut Hamsen, two writers I whom greatly
admired, but I already knew that with the way things were stirring that
anything could happen further East.

Just that previous summer I had taken a part-time nightly
job as a television news monitor/transcriber, since my novel was near its end,
where we just watched the nightly news and pretty much transcribed what was
happening. That summer of 1989 the news about Tiananmen Square in Bejing and
the hundreds of thousands of students who seemed to be taking over the Red
Chinese City filled the television news.Nightly we would transcribe the stories, our hopes and fears with
the students. Bravo! But alas, the Chinese government stepped in and crushed
the student spring uprising setting the resistance back to what it was, into
totalitarian numbness.

But watching the news in Copenhagen later that year, though I didn’t
understand the language, I saw that something was happening as well, and fast
too. West Berlin was seething with something and that year could also erupt or
stagger back into isolation, and being so close to it I changed my plans and
headed East. Berlin was now my destination. But to enter Berlin from the West
the train dipped eastwards, to Alexanderplatz, a boulevard of East Berlin, and
though I remained on the train technically I was in the East, the land from
which my parents had escaped some decades ago, the Communist and Stalinist
Empire, cut-off Russia. Throngs of crowds just stood on the platform trying to
get West and watched as a half empty train pulled in and pulled out of the East
Berlin station still I wanted to cry to them, “Come with me, please!” But I
didn’t and sadly looked out the window as the almost empty train rolled away
from East Berlin and entered West Berlin.

On the streets the city was a madhouse, crowds were
everywhere you turned and everyone was celebrating something, by drinking,
smoking, kissing and fucking. Passed a few people in the bushes and what else
could they be doing? Later I found out that the Berlin Wall had fallen and the
two Germanys would now be one, not East and West as it had been called for
years, but a united Germany. For a week I prowled in its drunken streets,
walking the length of the Berlin Wall in the city and seeing everywhere the
crowds cheering and celebrating, while I took hundreds of photographs as a
memento. After seven or eight days I knew I’d had enough and started to head
west again. Back on the train again and headed for Vienna, Austria. Ah bliss,
back to real freedom. Back to my memories, which by then were pretty constant.
of old New York City streets and what I had done in them, sexual
experimentation which I had forced upon myself.

And though I was in Vienna my notebooks once again came out and
where I had filled pages of Berlin memories, instead I now started filling up
pages and pages of what I remembered from my Times Square days back in the
1960s and 70s. Why Times Square in Vienna, Austria? I don’t know. Was it the
Berlin exuberance that had triggered these memories which had lain dormant and
silent through all the years? Why were the floodgates of Times Square suddenly
opened in Vienna after the mad celebrations in Berlin? Little did I know why
but it was a relief that it had taken so long to get them out. Seems that I had
triggered them into a form of remembrance and now nothing would hold them back.
I wrote and wrote, probably three weeks in a Viennese hotel room, hardly going
outdoors just buying food and further stacks of notebooks, filling pages and
pages of Stallers (that was my name for the bathroom stalls in the Times Square
movies houses and Stallers was also my name for the men who prowled the stalls
therein). You could say I was on a roll, but sadly, and also exhausted, I did
return to America around Christmas time and got down to my new work, the rewriting
of Stallers, which now took a few years after that.

Needless to say, Stallers also took years before I saw
it in print. It was not until I made contact with Jean Marie Stine and M.
Christian that they brought it out as an e-book. A year or so after that they
also brought it out as a paperback collection called Times Square Queer with additional
Times Square tales, which I’m very proud of having and holding in my hands. The
e-book of Stallers
and the paperback of Times Square Queer, which has all of Stallers
and other stories are, I believe, my best work. Hope you come to believe that too!

Mick Mykola Dementiuk is a two-time winner of the Lambda
Award, and his collection, Times Square Queer, was a finalist for the 2012
Bisexual Book Award. Visit him at http://dementiuk.weebly.com or
http://www.MykolaDementiuk.com